April 2009

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2009.

Woman gets community service for Craigslist revenge:

Kari A. Heath of Strum, Wisc., who I first posted about here was sentenced to community service for placing an ad on craigslist that said her ex-boyfriend wanted men to call him at home and work and talk dirty to him. You don’t hear about those kind of ads in the newspaper personals.

***

Police shut down illegal Delray Beach massage parlor, arrest two advertising on Craigslist:

Police in Delray Beach, Florida shut down the Marina Wellness Center which was just a massage parlor advertising on craigslist. Those arrested were Luz Silva, 46, and Rosa Pineda, 30. The thing is they advertised not under erotic services but in the therapeutic services section. Now why didn’t craigslist self policing community flag the ad? Well, from what I’ve been told the illegitimate massage parlors have a ‘flag army’ that flags the ads of the legitimate massage places. It’s funny how a policy intended to get rid of illegal activity just helps it prosper.

***

Is Craigslist ‘erotic services’ tab just a cover for hookers?:

Yes. Yes it is.

Meeting IL AG Madigan:

craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has posted on the official craigslist blog that he is looking forward to meeting with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

He says he’s looking forward to discussing the progress made since their joint statement last November.

What progress? Are you that delusional Jim? You can’t say craigslist has regressed in criminal prevention either because it doesn’t do anything worthwhile to prevent criminal activity on its site.

He reminds me of Baghdad Bob saying there were no American troops in Baghdad as the tanks rolled in.

Source: 16 Pairs of Women’s Underwear Found in Home of Alleged ‘Craigslist Killer’:

Basically there’s really only two worthwhile pieces of information from this article. The first is as I mentioned in the headline Philip Markoff has been taken off of suicide watch but he’s still wearing the paper clothes. The second piece of information is that Markoff told his family to forget about him because more information is going to come out. What that information may be is anyone’s guess.

However this allows me to address something. I am not going to post the more salacious and gossipy parts of this story. I personally could give a rat’s ass if his fiance is going to call off the marriage or not. I’m only interested in seeing justice served for the death of Julissa Brisman.

Police, Former Prostitute Urge Sex Workers: Stay Off Craigslist:

This is a great story from Channel 11 in New York City about a former craigslist hooker named Sasha who has not only turned her life around but is now urging sex workers to stop using craigslist.

Sasha used craigslist in 2005 to advertise her services but when she went to meet her client the guy turned out to be a junkie who pistol whipped her repeatedly and stole $1700 from her. The damage to her nose ended up costing her thousands of dollars to repair.

Now she’s a paralegal and has this advice for the working girls….

She says her warning is worth it if even one sex worker stays off the anonymous site. “If you want to make money go and get a job. Nobody’s going to protect you. If you have a pimp, he’s not going to protect you. . . . This is your life. You have to be proud of your life. “


Words to live by.

I received the following e-mail from someone who wishes to remain anonymous. I’m leaving the alleged scammers name unchanged because I would almost guarantee it’s an alias. Anyway on to the e-mail…

Last year when I was living in SoCal, I rented a room from Robert Larry Biel via craigslist LA and subsequently and unwittingly became a squatter in a home he did not own but had lived in for several months, charging people $500/month rent in 3 different rooms; and never paid the home owner a penny of it. He was also prostituting his girlfriend and at least one of the roomates via craigslist as well.

2 days after I moved in, he backed a truck up to the front door and moved himself and his prostitute out of the house. That was a Sunday.

On Monday night, he came back and broke into the power box at the back of the house, shut off the power and padlocked the box. We had to call the power company to come out at midnight to turn the power back on.

On Tuesday I had the locks changed and no sooner had I left for work; he came back to the house with his prostitute and they broke into the house via a doorwall and threw the other roommates things out on the front lawn, put the doorwall back and left.

Later that day THREE different people came to the house saying they had just given him $1000 to move into the house that day. The 3rd person actually showed up WITH this guy as the homeowner, 2 room mates AND the LAPD stood in the front yard. Even the cops didn’t try to detain him.

I swear I couldn’t make this up!!!

That’s when I decided to leave LA and just move on, but the guy is a bad person and you should know about it.

After I left LA, I remembered I had read a warning about him on craigslist written by some one he had ripped off and HIS ad was flagged and then blocked.

Craigslist should take the moral high ground and stop allowing the kinds of postings that are allowed at this time.

I guess that’s it.I never pressed charges because I left LA.

Thanks for reading about my adventure in LA-LA land!!! People really are different in SoCal!!!!


Actually most of the people I met in SoCal were actually nice but I know what you mean. If you’ve had an experience like this with Mr. Biel, if that is his real name, feel free to post it in the comments.

Man arrested after posting Craigslist murder ad:
$1 million bail for suspect in Craigslist sex-and-death case:

Once again I’m late to the party. I’m sure most of you have heard by now about the guy from Washington state who posted ad on craigslist looking for a woman he could have sex with then kill her and get paid for it too.

That man allegedly is 24-year-old Shawn T. Skelton of Kent, Washington.

Supposedly a craigslist employee spotted the casual encounters ad entitled “A strange desire” where Skelton allegedly expressed his desire to have sex with a woman he could murder and his fee was $1000.

Seattle police intervened contacted Skelton in an undercover capacity.

Investigators say after communicating with the man about 30 times, during which the man doubled his price to $2,000, detectives set up a sting at the Aero Motel in South Seattle where the man allegedly agreed to meet the would-be murder victim.


But of course the victim was the Seattle PD. Skelton allegedly had a length of chain and a knife on him at the time of his arrest.

Not surprisingly anymore his girlfriend is proclaiming his innocence and that police set him up…

“He didn’t do anything,” the woman said. “If he was doing anything, he was trying to figure out a way to get money. He had no intent to go through with it.”

She said she read some of the e-mails between police and her boyfriend and she said the police “definitely entrapped him.” She said the issue of payment was brought up by officers, not by her boyfriend.

“They offered him money and we’re broke, living at our grandmother’s house,” she said.

“He actually has a lot, lot, lot of mental issues that need to be dealt with … But he’s not really the person they’re making him out to be,” she said. “He’s a good person, an amazing father, and I love him and support him.”


Not only is love blind but it’s retarded.

Skelton allegedly placed the ad so guess what sweetheart, it’s not entrapment.

Skelton is currently being held on $1M bond.

Now this brings up a few points. First Skelton must be the dumbest criminal in America. With all the attention on craigslist now thanks to the so called craigslist killing out of Boston you would think that he would have picked a different avenue. Or maybe he picked craigslist because of all the attention. Either way he’s an alleged idiot.

Secondly the ad was discovered by a craigslist employee. I thought they didn’t have the manpower to monitor their ads since they only have 28 employees. If you monitor one you have to be able to monitor all.

Lastly where was the so called community policing that craigslist brags about so much. Why wasn’t this ad flagged by the other craigslist users?

craigslist’s response should be interesting if they deem this incident worthy enough to give one. I bet it will be about how they helped the police.

Thanks to Soobs, SuziQ, Greg and Steve Huff for the tips.

Geebo.com CEO and friend of the site Greg Collier issued the following response after this blog post at Switched.com appeared…

As an avid user of social networking sites, and a firm believer in their powers, I am pumped to challenge Craig, the founder of Craigslist, to a Twitter-off. Now I don’t doubt that a dance-off would have been more entertaining to watch, and laugh at, the message Geebo is looking to spread is definitely more serious than popping and locking.

It is funny to me that Craig has chosen to block me from sending direct messages to his Twitter account, instead of addressing the truthful allegations of Craigislist’s gross, and deadly, practices. Don’t worry though; Craig is still able to read my Twitter messages challenging him and Craigslist to clean up their act. With his decision to block Geebo, he has chosen to spend his time viewing my recent Twittering by searching Twitter directly. The irony is that the amount of time it takes to search for my recent Tweets, is equal to the amount of time it would take to remove the Erotic Listings section on Craigslist. Who would have thought that saving a life could be done in a Tweet? Well…Geebo did.

Unfortunately, Craigslist prefers a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. If people don’t ask for added security and privacy, they don’t tell them that they are risking their property, identity, savings and life. Such a policy is apathetic, dangerous and irresponsible. Posts go live on Craigslist within 15 minutes, leaving zero room for Craigslist management to review and revoke possible illegal or dangerous postings. This oversight, or rather laziness, is largely to blame for gross amounts of child pornography, prostitution, human trafficking, drug sales, stolen merchandise, identity theft, real estate scams and murder taking place across the United States.

Craigslist lacks a system of checks and balances that provides users with the degree of safety they deserve. Flagging, Craigslist’s joke of content monitoring is nothing more than a feel-good tool for the site’s management to claim that they are taking precautionary measures. Obviously, they have failed. More times than not user complaints are answered by an auto-responder, not a staff member. Conversely, those posts truly in need of flagging and removal go undisturbed.

At Geebo we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We pride ourselves in our humor and humility as we build, maintain and enlarge our online classified site. The only time we turn serious, however, is when the safety and security of our users is in jeopardy. In staying true to our goal of positively influencing and impacting the physical communities in which we serve, we have opted not to allow erotic services postings on Geebo. We don’t believe that there is an adequate way to regulate such a category that provides the necessary degree of privacy and security our users, and any users, should be afforded. So we don’t do it. Additionally, Geebo personally reviews each and every post submitted prior to publication. Taking user safety seriously isn’t a point to be mocked…it should be applauded.

If I were MySpace or Facebook friends with Craig I would trust that I would be de-friended shortly. After a Twitter “block” additional social networking embargoes typically follow suit. We aren’t friends on MySpace or Facebook, though I am not too concerned. I don’t need, much less want, friends who put their friends, clients or the public at large in harms way.


Again, in the interest of transparency I have no personal stake in Geebo.

Mo. Attorney General Investigating Craigslist:

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster was one of the Attorneys General who also foolishly, in my opinion, entered into an agreement with craigslist thinking that they would actually do something about their erotic services section. Now he is demanding a meeting with representatives from craigslist in the next two weeks. He is also launching an investigation into craigslist but what that investigation entails is as of yet unknown.

Again I have to ask where he was before the murder of Julissa Brisman. It’s amazing how the media can dictate public policy when I’ve been screaming this from the rooftops for over two years. But hey I’m just some blogger.

Reader Melanie wants to know if anyone has had any interactions with a possible scammer who goes by the name of Richard January. According to her he maybe running real estate scams on craigslist in the Montrose, Colorado area.

If you’ve had any dealings with Mr. January no matter where you live please leave your experience in the comments.

Evansville man falls victim to Craigslist scammer:

A man from Evansville, Ind. is out a few grand after falling for the fake check scam when trying to rent out a 2 bedroom home. The scammer used the e-mail address of rebeccawilliam@aol.com. The scammer claimed she lived in Paris and sent the man a check for more the amount and asked him to wire back the difference.

***

Mt. Laurel woman’s car stolen by Craigslist buyer:

A woman had her car stolen in Pennsauken, NJ after meeting what she thought was a prospective buyer for her car. The woman was selling her car on craigslist.

***

Teen arrested for selling stolen TVs on Craigslist:

18-year-old Charles Campbell Delony of Gainesville, Florida was arrested for selling TV that he stole from apartments on craigslist. Again, world’s biggest fence.

***

Douglas County Man Convicted In Craigslist Child Prostitution Case:

53-year-old Timothy Houser of Douglas County, Colorado was convicted of patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute from craigslist. Houser will be a registered sex offender for life.

« Older entries

Bad Behavior has blocked 648 access attempts in the last 7 days.